Running a business takes more than just prioritizing your sales and the quality of your products or services. To guarantee the long-term success of your company, you should learn how to take good care of your customers.
This entails that you need to improve the overall experience they have with you. This will allow them to enjoy buying from your company, recommending it to their family and friends, and turning themselves into loyal customers.
Elevating your customer experience allows for a smoother experience with your business. To help you out, below are some steps to help enhance your customer experience:
1. Prioritize Handling Issues
There will be instances where your customers might experience issues with your business. It could be shipping, product, or service related. When that problem occurs, they’ll get in touch with you, hoping for a quick resolution. However, if it’ll take for your business to respond for more than 24 hours, it might make them irate. This can result in a poor customer experience and affect their decision to repurchase from you.
Along with your sales, you should prioritize handling every issue that your customer throws at you and respond as promptly as possible. Ideally, you should respond within 1-12 hours from their email. To make things easier and more organized, you can use support ticket software that helps you to filter everything and ensure that you’ve combed everything out.
2. Gather Feedback
The best way to serve your customers is to know exactly what they’re expecting and experiencing with your company. They might have a poor customer experience from your customer-facing team, be dissatisfied with your packaging, unhappy with your response rate, and so on. Gathering feedback allows you to identify your business’s pain points and look for ways to improve them. You can ask for feedback by making a feedback form available in-store or emailing your online customers after receiving their orders.
Of course, the feedback you gather is only as useful as your ability to interpret it and implement new policies. Using free Google Sheets templates, you can track metrics for customer feedback and establish patterns in your company policies that are leading to poor interactions. This sort of software is essential to improving your business and since it’s easy to use, you can train your employees easily to use it.
3. Improve UI/UX On Your Website
People enjoy browsing online when they can easily navigate through pages and find what they’re looking for. To help serve your customer better, you should improve your website’s user interface/user experience or UI/UX design. You can hire a professional to guarantee effective results. You can even rebrand your website into something more modern and easier to navigate. Try to make everything easily accessible and fast-loading to maximize the great experience for your customers.
4. Create Emotional Connection
Customers like to purchase from a company where they can feel like they’re friends. They’re not just people who buy something from you, but someone who helps you to reach your goal. Gaining an emotional connection with your customers help to make everything feel more personal, allowing them to trust your business more. You can gain emotional connection by showing more empathy to your customers. You can send them flowers on their birthday with a little note. It doesn’t have to be too expensive, as a single stem would do.
5. Use Multiple Platforms For Customer Support
Your customers would like to get in touch with you as quickly and conveniently as possible. To help your customers reach you better, you should provide multiple platforms for communication, which helps reduce friction in the process. You should be asking ‘what is a frictionless customer experience‘ and striving to implement it at every stage, and this is a crucial one. If customers have to use a specific method to get in touch, that will likely push them away. You could use traditional email, send a form on your website, call your office, or give out your social media accounts. While it might be added work for accounts management, it’ll allow your customers to look for ways to get in touch with you conveniently.
6. Train Customer-Facing Teams
Your customer’s full experience when buying at your store would involve your customer-facing teams. Their service can make or break your customer experience.
To ensure that your customer will have a great time shopping with you, you should train your customer-facing teams to be professional, proactive, and responsible when handling customers. They should provide maximum sensitivity and allow their customers to feel special and well-taken care of. You can create monthly training programs to keep your teams at bay with how they should treat everyone that enters your store.
Apart from your physical store, you should train your email and customer support team. Even if they don’t see face-to-face, they should still provide maximum care and professionalism to every customer.
7. Keep Connected With Your Customers
Ideally, you should always be in touch with your customers from their browsing to buying phase. You can keep in touch with your customers by guiding them about what product or service would work best for them without pushing what’s the most expensive item you have in store.
After buying the product, you shouldn’t stop being a business by letting your customers handle everything on their own. After their purchase, you should ask for their feedback and provide tips on how they can better use their purchase.
8. Implement A Loyalty Program
A great way to keep loyal customers is by implementing a loyalty program. This allows your customers to gain points from every purchase, which they can redeem. You can give out free store credit or an item once they’ve reached their goal.
You can even provide special discounts for your platinum card holders, encouraging them to buy to maintain or achieve high status. With the number of benefits you can provide to your customers, it’ll surely make them happy to buy from you.
9. Consider Team Feedback
Not every customer can provide feedback on their shopping experience. It could be due to frustration, or they just don’t have the time or forgot to give you feedback.
To still be aware of how your customers perceive your business, you should gather team feedback and hear their customers’ most common complaints or opinions about the company. When your team provides honest feedback, try not to pin the problem on them but rather help to provide a working solution.
You can also take this opportunity to know your team’s thoughts with your management. While you try to make your customers happy, you shouldn’t forget that your team needs to be comfortable working with you. If they’re not in their best mood, they might not be able to serve your customers properly. They might be complaining about a few people during their shifts, the impossibility of asking for a leave from work, or too much workload beyond their job description.
Takeaway
Your customers deserve the best service as much as possible. This will help them to stay in your business and give you amazing sales. As you follow the nine steps enumerated above, you’ll surely help to elevate your customer experience, allowing them to be happy. This can help you reach more people and create a credible image and brand in the industry. It might be a bit of hard work, but this’ll surely help to bring your company to greater heights.
